It is unthinkable for any functioning museum to not have an inviting website to encourage interest and visitors. All the many kinds of museum-specific information, from gallery contents to administrative information and perhaps an online gift shop, are featured on the website to make it easy for people plan a visit. Also, many museum websites house scholarly articles and unique photographs. So how does a museum go about creating a website that attracts visitors? There are three main steps:
-
Design
Many museum websites are a mixture of pages and blogs, a perfect application for a WordPress website. WordPress is the popular website development program that allows you to choose among hundreds of different themes to express your design. Unless you are experienced at website design, it is a job best left to a professional webmaster. You will want to design your site so that the topics flow naturally and are organized simply.
-
Content
Content is probably the most important component of your website. Poor content – bad grammar, misspellings, improper punctuation, etc. – can sabotage your efforts and turn off the general public. As an institution of higher learning, you will want to ensure you have literate, yet snappy, content that is accessible to the common person, not just the specialist. Your museum staff can prepare the various articles and blogs to populate your website design, and if you need help you can always hire a professional freelance writer to provide additional material or editing.
-
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Most museums are non-profit, and as such do not have funds for paid advertising campaigns on the Internet. The much less expensive alternative to advertising your website is to use SEO techniques. One important technique is backlinking: the establishment of hyperlinks from other websites back to yours. The more backlinks you can garner from related, high-ranking websites, the higher page rank your site will achieve. You can check backlinks using an Internet tool to tell you the quantity and quality of sites linking to yours. An SEO can help you establish new backlinks and even post new backlinked articles for you. You will find that your page rank increases as you collect more backlinks, especially if they originate at .edu and .org websites – search engines regard those as more authoritative.
There are secondary considerations you’ll need to mull over. For instance, does your museum have a logo? Will you want to set up an online shopping cart linked to your museum’s gift shop? What photographs do you want to display, and how should you arrange them? Work closely with a webmaster you trust, and you will amazed at what a difference a well-conceived website can make for your organization.